The
Galleria Borghese (English: Borghese Gallery) is an art gallery in
Rome, Italy, housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana. It is a
building that was from the first integral with its gardens, nowadays
considered quite separately by tourists as the Villa Borghese gardens.
The Galleria Borghese houses a substantial part of the Borghese
collection of paintings, sculpture and antiquities, begun by Cardinal
Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V (reign 1605–1621). The
Villa was built by the architect Flaminio Ponzio, developing sketches
by Scipione Borghese himself, who used it as a villa suburbana, a party
villa at the edge of Rome.

Scipione Borghese
was an early patron of Bernini and an avid collector of works by
Caravaggio, who is well represented in the collection by his Boy with a
Basket of Fruit, St Jerome Writing, Sick Bacchus and others. Other
paintings of note include Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, Raphael's
Entombment of Christ and works by Peter Paul Rubens and Federico
Barocci.

History

The
Casina Borghese lies on the outskirts of seventeenth-century Rome. By
1644, John Evelyn described it as "an Elysium of delight" with
"Fountains of sundry inventions, Groves and small Rivulets of Water".
Evelyn also described the Vivarium that housed ostriches, peacocks,
swans and cranes "and divers strange Beasts". Prince Marcantonio IV
Borghese (1730–1800), who began the recasting of the park's formal
garden architecture into an English landscape garden, also set out
about 1775, under the guidance of the architect Antonio Asprucci, to
replace the now-outdated tapestry and leather hangings and renovate the
Casina, restaging the Borghese sculptures and antiquities in a thematic
new ordering that celebrated the Borghese position in Rome. The
rehabilitation of the much-visited villa as a genuinely public museum
in the late eighteenth century was the subject of an exhibition at the
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2000,[1] spurred by the
Getty's acquisition of fifty-four drawings related to the project.

In
1808, Prince Camillo Borghese, Napoleon's brother-in-law,[2] was forced
to sell the Borghese Roman sculptures and antiquities to the Emperor.
The result is that the Borghese Gladiator, renowned since the 1620s as
the most admired single sculpture in Villa Borghese, must now be
appreciated in the Musée du Louvre. The "Borghese Hermaphroditus" is
also now in the Louvre.

The Borghese villa was
modified and extended down the years, eventually being sold to the
Italian government in 1902, along with the entire Borghese estate and
surrounding gardens and parkland.

Collection

The Galleria Borghese includes twenty rooms across two floors.

The
main floor is mostly devoted to classical antiquities of the 1st–3rd
centuries AD (including a famous 320–30 AD mosaic of gladiators found
on the Borghese estate at Torrenova, on the Via Casilina outside Rome,
in 1834), and classical and neo-classical sculpture such as the Venus
Victrix. Its decorative scheme includes a trompe l'oeil ceiling fresco
in the first room, or Salone, by the Sicilian artist Mariano Rossi
makes such good use of foreshortening that it appears almost
three-dimensional.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini at the Borghese

Many
of the sculptures are displayed in the spaces they were intended for,
including many works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which comprise a
significant percentage of his output of secular sculpture, starting
with early works such as the Goat Amalthea with Infant Jupiter and Faun
(1615) and Aeneas, Anchises & Ascanius (1618–19) [3][4] to his
dynamic Rape of Proserpine (1621–22), Apollo and Daphne (1622–25) [5]
and David (1623) [6] which are considered seminal works of baroque
sculpture. In addition, several portrait busts are included in the
gallery, including one of Pope Paul V, and two portraits of one of his
early patrons, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1632).[7] The second
Scipione Borghese portrait was produced after the a large crack was
discovered in the marble of the first version during its creation.
Nearby museums

Also
in Villa Borghese gardens or nearby are the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte
Moderna, which specialises in 19th- and 20th-century Italian art, and
Museo Nazionale Etrusco, a collection of pre-Roman objects, mostly
Etruscan, excavated around Rome.

Notes

Making
a Prince's Museum: Drawings for the Late Eighteenth-Century
Redecoration of the Villa Borghese. Getty Research Institute (17
June-17 September 2000). Catalogue by Carole Paul, with an essay by
Alberta Campitelli. ISBN 978-0-89236-539-5 He had married Pauline
Bonaparte; Antonio Canova's half-nude portrait of her as Venus Victrix
takes pride of place in one of the galleries.
Web Gallery of Art, image collection, virtual museum, searchable database of European fine arts (1100–1850)
Web Gallery of Art, image collection, virtual museum, searchable database of European fine arts (1100–1850)
Apollo and Daphne by BERNINI, Gian Lorenzo
Web Gallery of Art, image collection, virtual museum, searchable database of European fine arts (1100–1850)
Bust of Scipione Borghese by BERNINI, Gian Lorenzo